It is often said history repeats itself and so I feel the desire the recant the events of exactly 11 years previous to this years hash. That would be 12/8/2005. I checked the historical records (archive.org) and believe I have my date correct. On this night it presented the unique combination of rain, hashing downtown and Snow Night (now called WinterFest), the same as we have this week. As you might guess, religion was held at the Soquel/Front parking garage – just as is scheduled this week. Due to inclement weather, the collective decided to have religion one level down and avoid being wet. This resulted in a large volume of sound being generated. Because it was Snow Night and there were many families to hear it and many nearby police to respond. The police believed it was fight. Religion was held in a corner by the stairs. The cops pinned us in. One cop coming up the stairs on foot and two cop cars were coordinated to arrive all at the same moment.

When the cops arrived, they were kind of dumbfounded – expecting a fight, only to find people drinking. They said, dum-dee-dum-dum – you gotta go. Hashers fled the scene of the crime as quickly as possible and no arrests were made. Banana Basher took one for the team and negotiated with the cops. Perhaps his truck full of toys helped (it was Toys for Tots night). I had no alcoholic beverage in my possession when the coppers arrived, so I stuck around to see if Banana need to be bailed out.

The end of the story is Banana’s vehicle was not parked in a parking spot and the coppers requested it be moved. However, Banana was no condition to operate a moving vehicle, so he requested I do it. It only need to moved around 5 feet. However, Banana had some sort of funky transmission and it took me about 5 minutes to move those 5 feet. Banana knew exactly what was going on and was laughing inside his head the entire time while the police watched.

So, I believe the lesson to be learned for this week’s hash is should conditions occur such as religion is moved down one floor, it is done with contemplation.